The subject of his anathema is “M. Therese Lysaught’s grave doctrinal error.” He notes that she points out that the fetus was doomed no matter what, that

it was not a case of saving the mother or the child. It was not a matter of choosing one life or the other.

Then he spends the rest of the long piece saying fuck that.

He quotes JP2 saying it’s disobedience to God’s law. He quotes the catechism. He insists on the (authoritarian and theocratic) claim that some acts are inherently evil no matter what the intentions and circumstances, period.

The intentionally-chosen act is the removal of the prenatal from the mother prior to viability, and this act is inherently ordered toward the death of the prenatal. The prenatal dies as a direct result of his or her removal. The inherent moral meaning of this act is the killing of an innocent prenatal. In other words, the essential moral nature of the act is murder. No creative explanation can change the fact that the death of the prenatal results directly from his or her removal and that this removal was intentionally chosen. The good intention to save the life of the mother, and the good consequence that one life is saved instead of two lives being lost, cannot change the moral object from evil to good.

Because it’s murder. That’s what “murder” means. It’s bad. The end.

In the Phoenix abortion case, the abortion was willed as a means to save the life of the mother; saving a life was the good intended end. And the circumstances were such that the abortion resulted in the good consequence that her life was saved. However, the end does not justify the means. Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire.

It would have been morally good to let the woman die along with the fetus and leave four young children to deal with that however they could. Consequences are beside the point. Outcomes are beside the point. There was an unconscious undeveloped fetus with no plans or thoughts or memories or ties, inside the woman, therefore the woman had to be allowed to die and the fetus’s conscious thinking feeling siblings had to be bereft. Period.

Pope John Paul II taught that there is no room for ‘creativity’ in the moral determination of intrinsically evil acts; such acts are irremediably evil. In the case of direct abortion, we cannot find some creative explanation that would justify the act and save the life of the mother. We can only evaluate the moral object, and refuse to willingly choose any act of direct abortion, regardless of the cost, regardless of the cost, regardless of the cost.

That is the nub of the matter, right there. Consequences, for the absolutist, are entirely beside the point. This is argued day in and day out by the church, in its arguments against abortion and assisted dying. Consequences do not matter to these bastards. They sit in their their diocesan chancelleries and funnel the magisterium to their own people and impose it on others, and they care not a fig for anything else, so long as their law is applied. (Saving the woman’s life by aborting a fetus which would not have survived anyway, has caused grave scandal to the faithful, fater all.)

The Roman Catholic Church is a morally corrupt institution, and yet the press falls over itself to find words of praise enough for the pope and his henchmen, governments capitulate at the very sight of the pallium, and accommodating atheists are angered when gnu atheists speak their mind about what they see as moral decay. Consequences simply don’t matter. Little girls must bear twins, women must die, and others must die in excruciating misery or humiliation. There is nothing that can be said that can exculpate this bunch of moral pirates. They send out raiding parties of effete men in skirts and the world lies flat at their command. It’s a sobering thought.

The physician who chooses an act of euthanasia claims that he is not ‘willing’ the death of the patient, but is only willing the relief of suffering. But despite this claim, by intentionally choosing an act that is inherently directed toward the death the patient, he is necessarily choosing the act and its inherent moral nature, as determined by its moral object.

In other words, if someone is suffering with no hope whatsoever of survival, then they should suffer with no hope whatsoever of survival. Until they die. In great agony.

This is one of those subjects that reminds me why I’m so animated in the first place about religious silliness. When my friends say “What’s the big deal” or “Why can’t you let it go?” I generally bring up stuff like this. Here we have this fool Conte, who’s brain is so pickled in superstition that he views it as moral to prolong suffering literally as long as possible, until the patient draws her final, pain-soaked breath. The physician that wishes to end that pointless suffering, in Conte’s view, is morally indistinguishable from Jason Voorhees. Just a sadistic, cold-blooded killer. Religion is really dumb.

Bloody hell! I’m an anti-theist but between militant Islam, Catholic doctrine and Anglicans claiming prejudice because they can’t discriminate against homosexuals, I’m feeling rather redundant right now:-(

Can anyone imagine being on the medical team and having to inform the family of this woman that you couldn’t save her life because that would have involved violating ERD#45? Actually, I assume that you would be expected to disclose no such thing. You’d be expected to say something along the lines of “There was nothing we could do,” without disclosing what could means. (Wasn’t this selective disclosure thing part of the Murphy report?)

Bishop Olmsted’s December 21 announcement opens with

Jesus says (Cf. Mt 25:40), “Whatever you did for the least of my brothers and sisters, you did for me.”

As I understand, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops endorses the New American Bible text.

whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.

It’s a hell of a thing to go with the politically correct when you’re reporting that a hospital is to be condemned because it didn’t leave a woman to die.

No doubt I am missing some fine point, but this absolutist line appears to say that causing the death of a human (or incipient human) is always an evil, and ‘ Intrinsically evil acts are never transformed into good acts by intention, no matter how noble, nor by circumstances, no matter how dire’. How then to justify the centuries of clerical murder of the heretical and the merely inconvenient: I had thought those evil acts were intended to save the ‘souls’ of the victims, but clearly that cannot have been a justification. And with what possible authority could Bishops have blessed soldiers going to war, when the deaths of innocents must have been an inevitable and foreseeable outcome? Did they not attract to themselves the same absolutist condemnation by learned theologians?

Olmsted is a fierce conservative to be reckoned with indeed. He apparently fired Jenny O’Connor, the nationally-recognised head of the Phoenix Diocese Office of Child and Youth Protection, because she had been married in only a civil ceremony.

Also during the 2008 Presidential election, Olmsted declared a candidate’s position on abortion to be the most important consideration for voters, stating, “When it comes to direct attacks on innocent human life, being right on all the other issues can never justify a wrong choice on this most serious matter.”

Also, in 2006, he denied communion to a 10-year-old autistic boy. In a letter to the boy’s family, Olmsted stated that the boy could not receive Communion until he could “actually receive the Eucharist, actually take and eat.”

In 2008, after the diocese had spent several million dollars to settle about 20 Law suits Olmsted led an initiative to shield the diocese from further sex abuse claims by incorporating local parishes individually. He arrived in the diocese after the one before him was involved in a serious road accident. I guess he was specially selected by the Vatican. A new broom sweeps clean.

Lysaught’s creative solution is to claim that the killing of the prenatal is not direct because the prenatal’s life could not be saved. If this were a correct analysis, then euthanasia would also be moral. For the person who is killed in an act of euthanasia is typically terminally ill, a person who is dying with no way to save his or her life.

Pope John Paul II: “Regardless of intentions and circumstances, euthanasia is always an intrinsically evil act, a violation of God’s law and an offence against the dignity of the human person.”

So the ultimate crime here is disrespecting God’s authority. God’s whims determine what is right or wrong, and it is evil for us to resist his whims.

But why is it that none of the media coverage of this case ever points out that God and the Easter Bunny have equal epistemological status? When it is a matter of life and death, why is it considered offensive to do so?

We need to keep hammering this point home, until the day it becomes unremarkable to acknowledge in print the fact that some people want other people to die, all in obeisance to the whims of the Easter Bunny.

I realize that Conte (the horrid little man) is just mouthing apologetics for the twisted dogma of the Vatican, both for their interpretation of religious texts but also for the pronouncements of this, and previous, Popes (maintaining the paper cloak of infallibility is a heavy burden). But why does it mean that they can’t consider the final outcome to their actions and the horrible cost to the family if both fetus and mother died?

Because of the unbending callousness of the church in this matter, it makes me wonder how many times in the past Catholic hospitals have sacrificed both mother and fetus to stay on good terms with their overlords. Is this something that could be investigated?

I’d give 10 to 1, no, 100 to 1, that a case of conjoined twins, where one twin would be killed by a necessary separation, would not get the same attention. Almost everyone would immediately see that the operation saved a life. It’s only because all these Catholic theologians need to throw their weight around on issues of politics and reproduction that this nonsense propagates around abortion. And the stupid thing is, of the two cases, this is the one in which there is clearly not a conscious human being that has died.

So much for the logic of paternalistic clerics – they will insist upon its inerrancy even when it results in perverse outcomes. I have my own personal beliefs about the inviolability of life but I would never insist that other people be required to adhere to them. I live a privileged life – I am a healthy, unmarried male, seventy-two years of age with access to good healthcare. It is unlikely that I’ll ever be faced with the life and death issues that confront so many others, particularly women. I am also an avid motorcyclist with a love for speed so I believe that it is more likely I’ll have a quick and violent end rather than having to suffer prolonged agony. Of course, I could be wrong about that so, from time to time, I reread “A Canticle for Leibowitz” by Walter M. Miller for inspiration so that I might be better prepared for that eventuality.

Excellent article and comments – Thank you Ophelia and thanks to all those commentators that address the many hypocrisies of the religionists.

I was just searching the vatican website. It appears that during the tenure of John Paul #2, they’ve jumped back into the 12th century. I can find no references to the fact that the catlick church accepted abortion if the child were doomed either way but the mother might be saved. I can’t remember if this were a consensus from some meeting, a papal bull, or actually written into Canon Law. At any rate, the church has definitely gone backwards. All the literature that various catlick organizations have up (including the vatican) call abortion ‘murder’ (in contradiction to the definition of the vast majority of, if not all, states which the catlick church infests) and proudly declare that the mother should be allowed to suffer and die for their fucking god.

Time to get out those spray cans and write some truth on the walls of cathedrals. The catlick church promotes cruelty to the sick and suffering. Oh well, what else would you expect from a cult that worships god-on-a-stick.

I’m pretty sure Ronald Conte would have been charged with murder if this woman was allowed to die, and the letter was made public. Perhaps this has been going on elsewhere, and therefore charges for murder may become a reality.

They sit in their diocesan chancelleries and funnel the magisterium to their own people and impose it on others, and they care not a fig for anything else, so long as their law is applied.

Eric – they can well afford to funnel the magisterium to their own brainwashed people, and have the audacity to try to foist it on outsiders, because it knows only too well, it is the only world religion with a seat in the United Nations. From that seat, the Vatican has been very active in promoting the most restrictive Roman Catholic views on family planning, etc. The Roman Catholic church is a very powerful force. Woe betide anyone who dares to challenge it – it will fight back with a vicious venom.

Click on the links in the ‘I’m not Catholic’ box on the upper right to see what I mean (they cover catholic morality (just do what the magisterium tell you) they tell you what happens after you die(!) and they show how the catholic church invented science!(“The truth behind our commercials”).

BTW, does anybody know if the patient herself is catholic? With such a “compassionate” bishop, can one expect much help from the catholic community during troublesome times? Her problems are far from over yet, even if one discounts the sorrow caused by losing the fetus:

I’d give 10 to 1, no, 100 to 1, that a case of conjoined twins, where one twin would be killed by a necessary separation, would not get the same attention.

Hell, I’d give 100 to 1 that this case would not get the same attention if more of the principals had been men.

In our outrage over the bishop’s indifference to a woman’s life, we shouldn’t miss the more mundane observation that the incident provided the bishop with an opportunity to crack down on an institution that seemed to think it didn’t have to bow to him. As the Church becomes more conservative, these kind of reactions become more common. Ask anybody with ties to a Catholic college of university.

“Pope John Paul II: “Therefore, by the authority which Christ conferred upon Peter and his Successors, and in communion with the Bishops of the Catholic Church, I confirm that the direct and voluntary killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral. This doctrine, based upon that unwritten law which man, in the light of reason, finds in his own heart (cf. Rom 2:14-15), is reaffirmed by Sacred Scripture, transmitted by the Tradition of the Church and taught by the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”

Obviously things have changed in RCC Inc. since the Inquisitions and the many executions undertaken by the Papal States (at a time when life wasn’t quite so sacred) – over 500 persons executed by Giovanni Battista Bugatti alone. I offer this little truth table for those who may be confused:

1.They were wrong then but they’re right now 2.They were right then but they’re wrong now 3.They were right then and they’re right now 4.They were wrong then and they’re wrong now

Can anyone imagine being on the medical team and having to inform the family of this woman that you couldn’t save her life because that would have involved violating ERD#45? Actually, I assume that you would be expected to disclose no such thing. You’d be expected to say something along the lines of “There was nothing we could do,” without disclosing what could means. (Wasn’t this selective disclosure thing part of the Murphy report?)

It doesn’t seem possible that people could operate legally as medical professionals and a hospital as a medical institution with a policy that, for any reason, required them to let people die in these circumstances. How could such a policy be legally permitted?

They send out raiding parties of effete men in skirts and the world lies flat at their command.

This was not intended to be anti-feminist or anti-female, or anything like that. A standing joke amongst priests is the riddle: “Who dresses up like mother and expects to be called Father?” But there is something very disturbing in seeing men dressed in skirts — that is, as though legged items of clothing had not been invented yet — comprising a closed fraternity in which women are not welcomed, and yet by which decisions of enormous consequence are made that affect women directly — often in disastrous ways. This gaggle of effete men think they have the right to legislate regarding women’s reproductivity — something about which they haven’t the slightest conception. And they deny women leadership roles in their little boy’s club. And they are like little boys. Listen to the pope! He whines and lies and misrepresents and dicates and, it seems, even holds his breath when he doesn’t get his way!

Moreover these men are effete, not in the sense of being effeminate, but in the sense of being pampered, lacking depth of character (many are painfully immature), and dependent. They are infertile as a matter of choice. In many ways they are emotionally immature, and sexually insecure. They remain deliberately childless, which may explain why they think abusing children is all right, since there is no chance that they will conceive. But they also abuse children because they are not able to master the complex emotional layering that is essential to mature relationships. Abusing children is just what the celibate imagination might come up with as an emotionally manageable type of sexual relationship. Besides, there are all the subsidiary benefits. Forbidden the use of contraceptives, children make unprotected sex possible, and they can’t even seem to imagine the kind of trauma abused children often experience, so they can reduce them to silence and invisibility. These things are all parts of the same package.

They are effete in other ways as well. Their imaginations are constrained by tradition and obedience, and are thus lacking in vigour and daring. Yet these obviously conflicted people believe that they have the right to be obeyed. They construct scholastic nightmares which they then call holy and impose on others. And a good portion of the world’s population accords them the deference and respect that they believe is their due.

I did not mean it as a denigration of women at all. It is a denigration of effete men who act in reprehensible ways, and I hoped some of the complexity of what I meant was carried by those few words.

One would think Catholic bishops were blowing up churches in Nigeria or mosques in Pakistan.

Or Big Ben!

But you know, I don’t think that this obsession will end until some Christian nujobs fly jets, or something, into The World Trade Centre

After having sexually mutilated hundreds of millions of women.

It’s a wonder some of the more astute commenters here don’t take a step back, seeings the identity of those engaging in murder in the name of religion these days, and take a more skeptical approach to these articles on catholic clergy, theologians and such.

If you can only bring yourself to read but three paragraphs of an essay by a catholic thdeologian, then I can only assume you could read but a single syllable of the koran.

“They send out raiding parties of effete men in skirts and the world lies flat at their command.”

Yes, a little homophobia is justified, when denouncing the RCC.

Catholic priests are ALL just fairies selling pixie dust.

As a gay man, I can assure all here that I regularly do exercises…to weaken my wrists.

If priests can be depicted as “effete men is skirts”, then in all fairness, you can be portrayed as a “bitter, jaded, old broad”

Oh, it makes me quite happy to read this. By all means, we should thank Conte for laying bare the moral bankruptcy of Catholic dogma in a way that no one else could. After all, if a Gnu were to try and assert that Catholic dogma inescapably led to such a disgusting brutal dehumanizing conclusion, she would surely be accused of constructing a strawman. Hell, even a theist of another religion might incur the wrath of Bill Donohue and his Catholic Anti-Speech League if they were to make such a horrible accusation.

No, only someone like Conte is capable of pointing out the stark violence inherent in Catholic dogma, and we should applaud him for it.

Sorry, Sauder, but ‘effete’ has almost nothing to do with effeminateness, though it may be stretched to mean that. It comes from the Latin ‘effetus’ (ex fetus) which really means ‘bred out’, and originally referred to animals that were exhausted from continuous breeding and giving birth. The effete are the weak, pampered, sheltered, ineffective, lacking in vigour, etc. etc., which some (clearly mistakenly) took to refer to the effeminate, and so Wouk, for example, according to Webster, uses it in this sense. But this is not its primary sense at all. So, no homophobia, and not warranted in any case, whatever the composition of the RC clergy may be.

One would think Catholic bishops were blowing up churches in Nigeria or mosques in Pakistan.

No, Sauder, rather, they are building up churches for proselytization purposes from funding that they get from devout, brainwashed, community dependent, captured audiences, who are in heightened emotional states in other countries. They don’t blow up churches only the minds of those who do not adhere to their authority.

Sauder, seeing that it’s visible from the earth every 75/76 years I must have seen it lots of times. However, the last apparition in 1986 saw me singing, not, Halleluia, but instead, halle-y-luia. Oh, wait, it’s been around since at least 240 BC – so I would have seen it in my past life. Let me get my calculator out…

Conte’s pronouncement touches tangentially on the rule of Double Effect — ie. that something done for good reason A (say, giving a pregnant cancer patient aggressive chemo) is permissible even if it has bad consequence B (say, causing her to miscarry), where it would not be permissible to do B directly (ie. just abort the fetus, then get on with the chemo). In this view the intent is everything, and damn the consequences. This allegedly high-minded, morally sophisticated view needs to be called out for what it is: moral cowardice. The Contes of the world hide from themselves the results of what they are doing.

Well, Sauder, since I was one of those ‘men in skirts’ for many years, though in the Anglican Church, I don’t have any particular implication in mind. There was the so-called ‘gin and lace’ crowd in the church, but it was, I think, said with some affection. But, in general, having lace on an alb or surplice had no sexual preference implications. It said much more about a kind of baroque eucharistic spirituality or exteme anglo-catholicism, than it did about sexuality. So the expression as I use it is not a put down of women, nor is it a reference to effeminateness. Sorry, if I disappoint your expectations.

Sauder – I tell you what. If you want to have a chance of continuing to comment here, you’re going to have to do it under your own name. I’m not going to let you keep dumping your bile here anonymously.

As Stephen Fry put it in the Fry/Hitchens versus Onaiyekan/Widdecombe debate about whether the Catholic church is a force for good in the world:

And what is the point of the Catholic church if it says ‘oh, well we couldn’t know better because nobody else did,’ then what are you for?

So either the “truths” the catlick church were espousing back in 1951 are timeless eternal truths or they are getting their morality and ethics from the same place the rest of are, from within ourselves as informed by the current moral zeitgeist.

As our moral zeitgeist continues to be informed by human/secular values, policies promulgated by the rcc back in 1951 look more and more repugnant to our current day understanding of what increases human wellbeing, as you point out.

And by the way, if you want homophobia, you need go no further than Widdecombe who apparently has found the CoE far to inclusive but has been welcomed with open arms by the rcc for her hateful views on equal rights for homosexuals.

Wise women wear trousers when they’re more practical, and skirts if they feel like wearing a skirt, eg on a hot day. Men, because they have huge hang-ups, tend not to wear skirts in public even when they would be more practical, eg on a hot day, or more sensuous. Priests wear skirts because they were normal wear centuries ago in the middle east, and it takes a thousand years for priests to change anything.

When the Roman ‘Catholic’ church’s evil dogmata about abortion were formulated, it was assumed that women are merely passive receptacles for men’s ‘seed’. It’s entertaining to reflect that if Aristotle had been right, and in vitro fertilisation merely provided an alternative to a human womb, then, once in vitro fertilisation had been invented, the ‘Catholic’ church would have had to insist that every spermatazoon is indeed sacred, and every single one should be harvested, collected, and converted into a human baby.

The key related question or questions would ask how often is it carried out, are there records, can it be stopped?

It seems to me that if it’s been carried out in practices/hospitals the US it’s a strong basis for a (malpractice? homicide?) wrongful death suit, and I can’t understand why anyone would insure a medical practice with an intentional death policy.

I might take those professing ‘outrage’ over the use of the term ‘effete’ more seriously if the objections were not manufactured by those who support a church which would happily see homosexuals burn in hell.

And no, the Catholic church isn’t flying airplanes into buildings but it’s not like Ophelia doesn’t regularly run articles critical of Islam is it?

I think Eric puts his finger on something very important (he has a habit of doing so!) when he points to the sexual and consequently emotional immaturity of such as our bishop and our theologian, and their inability or refusal to recognise or give weight to the layered complexity of our moral lives. It is what struck me when reading the soon-to-be-sainted (providing they can invent a miracle or two) John Henry Newman: an ultimately hysterical and infantile intransigence that I came to loathe.

Incidentally, the new Pope has been working fast in an effort to ‘raise the profile’ of the Catholic church: there’s now a new Australian saint, a new Canadian saint, and before long JHN will be the new English saint. Sanctified cynicism.

Tim, yes, indeed. As an example, just read his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. It shows a completely self-centred man, hysterical (to use your word), emotionally hyper-sensitive, though only in one register, entirely isolated from the things that make us human. You can even read the diminished humanity in his rather icy prose. His retreat to Rome was as much a retreat from the world as it was a flight from one church to another. And this is the same kind of thing that you find, only in a banal kind of bureaucratic legalism, in people like Olmstead, Conte, and, of course, the USCCB.

It is, of course, deeply problematic that these people are in charge of hospitals at all. Unless they meet certain standards of care they should not be able to manage and run hospitals, and they should not be able to apply their own narrow understanding of how moral issues are settled. There is a public hospital in Nova Scotia that is managed by an RC religious order. One of the things that struck me was one of their policies regarding emergency baptism. It stated something to the effect that baptism of a stillborn child would be carried out unless there definite are signs of — and I can remember the word they used, but it amounted to — decay. It’s a totally bizarre religion. But it is also very dangerous, because it does have so much involvement in civil society and can influence government in ways that other religions cannot. It needs its wings clipped.

If a three-year old child threatened the life of another and there was no other way to prevent serious harm and/or death other than by killing the three-year old then such killing would be justified as self-defense. Why does that defense become illicit when the “child” is still in the womb?

Aren’t hospitals certified by by the AMA (?) and doesn’t this certification include a review of their policies? What kind of magic hand waving is involved in the certification of Catholic hospitals? Has this issue ever been raised with the AMA? The issue of Vatican policy trumping secular standards of medical care has been around as long as I can remember – my Catholic mother wouldn’t step foot in a Catholic hospital. After her fourth child her doctor told her that another pregnancy would likely kill her. When she asked her priest for permission to use contraceptives, he flatly refused her (this was around 1946). What is the Vatican policy regarding hysterectomies?